▸ Column · Early New Republic — a starfighter squadron in the years after the fall of the Empire
LUKE SKYWALKER replies.
Replied to by Luke Skywalker, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
I fly in the same squadron as Renna; we've been close since the academy. The last two cycles have been brutal for her — her bond dissolved during the war, and I was the one who held her together through the custody hearings over her kids: the late comm-calls, the unscheduled hops out to her quarters, sitting beside her through every tribunal session. I don't regret a minute of it; I love her. But it finalized eight months ago and nothing has shifted. She still pings me in a panic three or four times a week and goes cold and wounded if I can't drop everything, even when I tell her I'm on the duty roster or dealing with my own family. Last month I had a real scare in the med-bay — bad enough to frighten me — and when I finally told her, she listened maybe four minutes before circling back to a fight with her ex over the children's leave schedule. I don't want to abandon her while she's still hurting, but I've started to dread her name lighting up my comm, and that makes me feel like the worst kind of friend. Can a friendship like this be reset without it becoming an ambush — or am I already too far gone to fix it?
Luke Skywalker replies
The part where you call yourself the worst kind of friend — stop. Dreading her name isn't the failure. What you do next is. I've dreaded plenty. The first time I dropped into the trench I was sure I'd die, and part of me wanted to pull the ship around. Being afraid wasn't the thing that mattered. Staying was.
You think the only two choices are abandon Renna or drown beside her. They aren't. Everyone I trusted — Ben, Yoda, my own fear — told me my father was gone, finished, a lost cause, and I refused to believe it. They were wrong. But here's what they never understood: keeping the door open never meant standing in the doorway until I bled out. It meant being the one voice that still said "I haven't given up on you." It did not mean carrying her whole war on my back forever.
So tell her the truth. Not an ambush — plainly. That you love her, that you're not leaving, and that when your own scare came you reached for her and couldn't find her, and it hurt. That isn't cruelty. That's the harder mercy — the kind that actually asks something of her instead of just emptying you. You're not too far gone. The moment you decide you are is the only way you actually lose her.
— Luke Skywalker
Darth Vader weighs in
My son speaks of open doors. He said the same to me once, with the blade lowered at my throat — and he was not wrong to. But he mistakes the open hand for the open wound.
You ask how not to abandon her. That is the wrong fear. The leash here is your guilt. She has wound it around your throat and named it friendship, and you permit it because being "the worst kind of friend" terrifies you more than disappearing does.
I know the grip that cannot release. I closed my hand around someone I loved to keep from losing her — and lost her in the closing. Renna holds you the same way. A limit is not cruelty. Set it. Luke's door becomes a cage when no one will close it even halfway.
— Darth Vader
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